Archive for February, 2018

The Light and Dark in our Stuffby Mere Taito (MT Productions)

Reviewed by Vaughan Rapatahana

This small (30pp) and beautifully presented book is Mere Taito’s inspired/inspiring first collection of poetry. The poems are lively, well crafted, the poet unafraid to call a spade a spade, to present stark differences between black and white.
There is considerable accent on body and bodily functions throughout the 10 poems within (5 x ‘dark’; 5 x ‘light’). Indeed, the very first saturnine poem, Bad Charity, regales the reader with bones, tears, frameless selves, skeleton, fractures – all in nine lines. The next poem, The Lost Art of Kissing a Government, delves further into the corpus both literally, and figuratively, as Taito refers to mouths (x 3), lips, teeth, tonsils, forked tongues, eyes, screams. Here she eviscerates not only governments, but also we who no longer chew up at and spit out legislators and administrators, and merely suck up to them.

So it goes in these dark (p)ages, for the very next schism-making poem Building Code, further references cavity-riddled human molars, skeleton, tibia, hair, cartilage, dislocated human spine, clammy hands – whereby humanity is deconstructed metaphorically and devolved physically – by humans.

Conflict Minerals furthers the depiction of human greed – here over tantalum – and the concomitant desperate sounds of hungry men; while the strongly worded This Charmed Life forces further the division, here between bucolic and bitumen, as angry villagers in Rotuma – the poet’s turangawaewae – confront the situation, whereby

Niall Ferguson thinks it should have been a history lesson. In his new book The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies, and the Struggle for Global Power, he argues we live in tumultuous times, largely because of powerful networks like Facebook. And if Zuckerberg and the rest of the Silicon Valley learned a bit of history, the world may be a little more certain and stable.

Connect the dots for history lovers

The Square and the Tower is an ambitious book, which bizarrely reminded me of the puzzle connect the dots. Yes, that’s right – I’ve just compared premier historian Niall Ferguson’s latest book to a juvenile game where the sole purpose is to connect dots to complete a happy picture, like a smiling triceratops, posing superhero, or fluffy bunny. Stay with me on this one.

Credit: Casey Sams

The Square and the Tower is connect the dots for history lovers. But here the dots are key historical groups (such as the Rothschild family) or figures (like Winston Churchill) and by connecting them together, Ferguson draws a big picture of how societies have been disrupted in unexpected ways. In his words:

[This book] proposes a new historical narrative, in which major changes – dating back to the Age of Discovery and the Reformation, if not earlier – can be understood, in essence, as disruptive challenges posed to established hierarchies by networks.

Ferguson argues that historians have given nation states and other hierarchical organisations too much credit for shaping the world. While empires like Great Britain and Spain colonised large parts of the world in their image, no ruler ever ordered the Enlightenment, or the French and American Revolutions. Networks caused these periods of turmoil, and Ferguson dedicates most of The Square and the Tower to describing this in detail.